ART Increasingly Safe for Mother and Child
Fertility and Infertility News
Obie Editorial Team
As assisted reproductive technology (ART) procedures have been perfected in recent years, the success rate of these procedures has risen admirably while safety concerns have diminished. A live birth marks success in ART procedures and more healthy babies are born every year as a result of ART.
Some advances leading to increased safety and success include:
A substantial body of medical evidence proves ART is increasingly safe for mothers and the children they bear but this data focuses more on conception rates and live births than on the mother’s experience with the procedures themselves. A team of researchers at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, headed by Dr. Jennifer F. Kawwass, pored through more than a million ART records to identify any trends in the number or types of complications being experienced by ART patients and egg donors.
The Kawwass team turned to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) National ART Surveillance System for complications arising from ART procedures involving fresh eggs; ART procedures involving frozen eggs were not included in the study.
Fertility specialists are required to report to the CDC’s surveillance system if any of these complications occur within 12 weeks of the initiation of a cycle involving ART:
In 1,135,206 autologous cycles (where the patient’s own eggs are used), the Emory researchers discovered:
Complications in donor-assisted cycles were significantly lower than in autologous cycles, with no evident trends. The researchers discovered no donor deaths as a result of ART but 13 recipient patients died during pregnancy.
According to the research team, "Increased awareness of the most common complication, OHSS, may prompt additional study to characterize predictors of this and other adverse events to inform the development of effective approaches necessary to decrease complication occurrence."
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